


feather stem

by deniigiq



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Daredevil (Comics), Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Chronic Illness, De-Serumed Steve Rogers, Disabled Character, Established Relationship, Fluff and Angst, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Matt can't stand to be in the presence of his childhood hero, bless him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-17
Updated: 2020-11-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:29:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27606313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deniigiq/pseuds/deniigiq
Summary: Sam broke down first and Bucky felt empty as he wrapped arms around him and told him, no.No. It would be okay. He’d see.Bucky had practice at this. Every time, they said that it was days, and every time, Steve said ‘fuck your days, gimme years or take me now.’He’d be okay, Sam. Hell didn’t want him. He wasn’t broken enough for them.(Steve gets de-serumed and works his way back from the brink.)
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Sam Wilson, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers/Sam Wilson, Matt Murdock & Franklin "Foggy" Nelson, Matt Murdock & Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers/Sam Wilson
Comments: 22
Kudos: 326





	feather stem

**Author's Note:**

> and now for something a little different.

There were more tubes than there was flesh.

There were people crowded around him, packed so tightly together that Bucky couldn’t see anything but a gray-white arm.

It was supposed to be pink. Pale from the elbow and then pinker and pinker to the hands that were ruddy, always ruddy. Like they were only minutes out of snow.

There would be scabs on the knuckles. There would be cracks in the bends.

But despite all those things, they would still curl and lift and paint and flex and—

Stevie, don’t die.

Not like this.

Nearly a hundred years ago, they would have been lucky to have a quack kneeling by Stevie’s bed, but today, misfortune and sacrifice and decades of hollowness brought a whole team of real doctors—credentialed, schooled doctors--into a crescent around Bucky and Sam. But they had the same reaction that the quack did.

Days, they said.

Weeks at the most.

Captain America was no more.

And somehow, that was a shock.

Bucky had gotten out of practice. He used to be better at this--at doc after nurse after doc after resident old woman who knew such things telling him, or rather _them_ , that it was only a matter of days.

Sam broke down first and Bucky felt empty as he wrapped arms around him and told him, no.

No.

It would be okay.

He’d see.

Bucky had practice at this. Every time, _they_ said that it was days, and every time, Steve said ‘fuck your days, gimme years or take me now.’

He’d be okay, Sam.

Hell didn’t want him. He wasn’t broken enough for them.

Bucky didn’t like all these people looking at Steve like he was a baby bird. Like he was a crystal bowl that all the kids in the house could look at once a year, but never touch—no, never touch.

Steve wasn’t beautiful. He wasn’t angelic like this. He was limp and pale and covered in tape and tubes. He was trapped where he was by all these machines—monitors, all laboring away like donkeys around him. He looked exactly like a fuckin’ TB ward patient, and it made Bucky want to puke as all these bystanders in their scrubs and paper suits and bunny slippers and hair nets whispered about how _comfortable_ he looked and how _fragile_ he’d been this whole time.

He did puke.

Sam held his hair back.

He knew better than to ask what was wrong.

Day 3, Steve didn’t wake up. His fingers had never been so pale—although the last memory Bucky had of these fingers had been eighty-odd years ago. They’d dug into the wool of his brand new uniform.

They’d dug into the wool.

Steve’s brow had furrowed and he’d taken one shuddering breath.

And the last Bucky had seen of him hadn’t been his fingers. It had been his eyes. Glossy with unfallen tears and stained blotchy red around the edges. He’d been crying all day, but hiding it somehow, as Bucky picked through the last of his things in their apartment. A pocketknife, a picture of his sisters, and the memory of Steve sitting out on the fire-escape, smoking a trembling cigarette, had been what he’d left New York with that summer.

He could barely remember the funfair. He couldn’t remember the girls.

Day 4, Steve didn’t wake up. People were asking Bucky questions about his will. They assumed that Bucky knew shit about it. They forgot that Bucky’s brain was an uneven patchwork of fishing nets, lumped and tangled together in places, corroded by time and acid and the dull scissors of HYDRA in others.

He wasn’t competent to be the executor of Steve’s will. Sam was. And that was killing him.

His tears were burning hot when Bucky wiped them from under his eyes and told him, as firmly as he could, that they didn’t need to do this.

They didn’t.

Day 5, Steve didn’t wake up.

Day 6, Steve didn’t wake up.

Day 7, the doctors asked Sam to start thinking about Steve’s quality of life.

Bucky told them to get the fuck out of his face. To stay the fuck away. Things would get better. They would. He could see it. He could _feel_ it.

The serum might be gone and Steve’s body might look fragile, but bone is stronger than steel, my friends.

Day 8, Steve didn’t wake up.

Day 10, Sam flipped silently through the documents Franklin Nelson brought to their home. He came all the way down to Brooklyn. He sat at the table with them instead of behind a desk like he usually did, and his eyes were blue.

Bucky had never noticed before.

Nelson’s eyes were blue and his lower lip was red from where he kept biting it to keep the tears clumping his eyelashes together from falling.

Nelson was thirty years old.

Bucky forgot sometimes that that was young.

He wasn’t that much older than Nelson, technically. You had to do some wild math, but when he’d gone down in the train, he’d only been 28. Stevie was 27, always one year behind. They’d stayed 28 and 27 for eons. Steve had woken up at 27 and had lived around ten years more. Bucky was always a year ahead.

They weren’t even forty.

Yet somehow, a century.

Not even forty.

A century.

“I can’t do this,” Nelson choked at the table. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Sam stood up. Nelson threw himself up, too, still apologizing.

“Franklin,” Sam said softly. “Please. I need your help, man. You’re the only lawyer in town who gets it.”

Oh, and how Nelson had gotten it. It was eerie, really, how well he’d understood Steve. How he’d understood Bucky.

Nelson made Bucky feel a little sick.

Those soft blue eyes. Blonde hair swept out of his face. His oval face.

Bucky could see a similar one from a Hitler Youth poster in another lifetime overlaid on top of it.

He was disgusted with himself. Sick to his stomach to his teeth to his knees.

Franklin Nelson was no Nazi. He was a soft-spoken, hardworking lawyer with blonde hair and blue eyes and a heart slowly cracking into pieces.

He was apologizing that he couldn’t do this.

“He’s not going to die,” Nelson said through the shaking of his jaw.

Bucky closed his eyes.

Nelson was the only lawyer who got it.

Truly.

“He’s not going to die like this,” Nelson said. “Don’t give up on him yet.”

Sam lowered his head.

A tidal wave of guilt went with it.

“Franklin,” Sam said, his own voice shaking. “I—I need—I need to be prepared. I can’t—I’ve got to prepare for the worst—”

A single tear escaped the rim of Nelson’s blue bucket.

“No,” he said.

He set his jaw and Bucky swallowed a sob.

“No,” Nelson said again. “He won’t die. I’ll prove it.”

Nelson got it.

Nelson _got it_.

Bucky knew he was right in trusting him.

“Frank,” Sam pleaded. “He’s not invincible. He’s just—”

“Don’t call me Frank,” Nelson snapped. “My name isn’t Frank. Or Franklin. My name is _Foggy._ Call me Foggy. I’ll prove it. I give you my word, Mr. Wilson.”

Bucky wanted it. Bucky would catch ahold of it and hold tight. He believed in that word. He had to because everyone else was saying no, no, no and Nelson— _Foggy_ Nelson, god, look at you, kid. You’ve been like me this whole time with a name like that—was saying ‘fuck you, give him _years._ ’

Bucky needed someone, anyone, to hear Steve’s voice screaming in his head alongside him.

“Foggy,” Sam choked. “Please help me.”

“Give me a chance,” Foggy said. “I swear to god. I’ve never done this and I’m giving you my whole fucking life right now, so just—give me a chance.”

Bucky didn’t know what that meant and neither did Sam, but Sam’s eyes were swimming and he wanted so badly to believe.

“What is it?” Sam asked.

Day 14, Steve didn’t wake up.

Nelson’s partner was almost as tall as him with red hair and a square jaw. He had soft, thick eyebrows and he moved his face from side to side when people spoke, but he never found the speaker.

The curve of his lips ran in stark contrast to the split in the bottom one that almost made Bucky sob.

Matthew Murdock held out a hand for Sam’s and when Sam took it, Murdock’s grip tightened and revealed split knuckles, poorly scrubbed of dried blood.

Bucky’s throat started closing.

In one thousand years, he never would have guessed that the devil was tucked up against Foggy Nelson’s side.

In one thousand years, he never could have imagined the devil having milky, discolored eyes, stained all around by gnarled skin warped by acid.

The devil held Sam’s hand and said that Captain America was the only disabled superhero he had growing up.

“I am not glass,” Matt Murdock, the devil, said, taking off those frames of his.

Pride in his voice.

Pride in his neck.

This boy was a man was a hero.

“We are not glass,” the devil said.

Matt Murdock, the devil, hadn’t perceived light in twenty years. He witnessed no shadows. He experienced no blurring.

He did not see, period.

His fingers dug into Foggy Nelson’s wool coat.

His fingers dug into that wool coat.

He looked a year younger than Foggy Nelson.

Bucky cried when he got home.

Matt Murdock, the devil, could not see, but he could feel the world wider than anyone could ever understand. His world was vast and cacophonous and endless and he knew what a dying heart sounded like.

He held them.

He’d held his father’s at ten years old, sitting on crushed glass in an alley, wailing like only a babe could for their daddy, who laid motionless, already gone even though his heart murmured under his only son’s hands.

Matt Murdock, the devil, stood next to Steve and closed his sightless eyes and said nothing.

He said nothing.

And then he turned around and rushed for the bathroom to puke his guts out because of the _smell_. The smell, the smell. Antiseptic and rot. An old man was rotting in the room adjacent. A woman had gone into labor two floors down. A pus-filled wound had cracked open in the leg of a man in the hallway.

It was too much for the devil to bear.

Foggy Nelson rubbed his shoulders in the cramped bathroom stall and asked him if Steve was dying.

The devil spat hard and said no.

No, his body was not compressing onto itself.

No, his lungs were not stretching in vain.

No, his problem was that he was making a soft, whispering, hoarse whine through the machine forcing air into his chest and out of it, and he was _scared_.

He smelled like fear and tears and panic.

He smelled like piss and iodine.

He didn’t smell like a dying man. He didn’t make the sounds of getting tired.

He wasn’t dying, the devil said.

He wasn’t made of glass.

Now, make it stop. Please, make it stop. Make it stop, make it stop, make it _stop_.

Please, Foggy.

It’s too much. I want to go home. It’s too much—I remember this—I remember. I can’t do it again.

Sam found Bucky crying with his arms on Steve’s bed and came and knelt down next to him. He laid his hands over Bucky’s and swallowed hard and whispered that he trusted Nelson.

He wanted to believe Matt Murdock, the devil.

But he didn’t know how.

Bucky didn’t know how to explain faith. He’d never had much of it himself. Steve had always been the religious one, all that Bucky had was experience.

He couldn’t explain it. His brain was swiss cheese and a broken computer and a load of tangled nets and all he could do was try to keep afloat and not be consumed by the surf.

Sam held his hands.

Day 16.

Steve woke up.

Sam’s dams cracked and exploded. Bucky whooped for joy.

And Steve?

Well, Steve.

He told the docs that them devils couldn’t have him yet.

Stevie was so fragile, and Bucky had forgotten. His bones were strong, but his eyes were heavy, tasked with the burden of carrying expressions on top of all those eyelashes.

He was exhausted.

He was anemic.

His back plagued him and his lips were too blue and he got the spins every time he stood up.

He came home from the hospital with a cough that turned into a choke that saw him back to the hospital and Sam introducing both him and Bucky to this thing called a ‘nebulizer.’ He introduced Steve to an ‘inhaler,’ which, Bucky was sorry on Steve’s behalf to find out, had nothing to do with cocaine.

It helped Stevie breathe, though, so it could stay anyways.

The inhaler went on top of the new glasses that Steve needed because he’d always been near-sighted but had never been tested. The frames were heavy with the prescription, but Steve didn’t mind them too much, as he told Bucky with a grin that they made him look scholarly.

Sam chewed a knuckle and later asked Bucky if that was 1930s-speak for ‘nerd.’

Steve was deaf in his left ear. Bucky had almost forgotten. It was why he spent so much time on Steve’s right, because otherwise he might not notice you trying to get his attention.

He squinted at lips and he used the sign language that Mrs. R had taught him as a child when she’d feared that the other ear would soon go the way of the first.

Barton said that he couldn’t understand Steve’s sign. It was old fashioned and outdated. But it was Steve’s and Bucky understood him, so he almost told Barton to go fuck himself when he pulled Steve aside and asked him if he wanted to learn the sign language of Now.

Steve said yes.

But he got sick when Barton started teaching him, and it was back to the hospital to get all the shit out of his lungs before pneumonia set in.

The docs were a little weirded out by Steve’s whole laundry list of problems, even though Bucky swore that historians had analyzed and over-analyzed every bit of his military records. Surely someone had already brought this to public attention.

Surely.

One of the residents told Bucky sheepishly that it was one thing to read all those things in a textbook and another to see them in the man himself right in front of you.

She was perturbed that she and Steve saw eye to eye. He was supposed to be towering and smooth-faced and proud.

Bucky thought he was still all those things. Just, you know, lower to the ground. That was all, no biggie.

Steve got a diagnosis as ‘immuno-compromised.’

He didn’t know what the fuck that meant and Bucky didn’t know what the fuck that meant. As far as he could tell, Steve was just sick all the time.

His diagnosis was ‘sick all the time.’

Sam freaked out, however, and chased everyone out of the house and had the whole thing deep-cleaned and while Bucky and Steve were reliving that one time they’d climbed the fence into the Jewish cemetery, he came back and herded both of them back inside and told Steve that immune-compromised meant that he had something going on with his body which meant that his immune system didn’t work like other people’s and so he had to be _careful_.

Steve said that that was sure a fancy word for ‘sick all the time.’

He signed it too, in case Sam had missed it.

Sam said that if he had a stroke, it would be Steve’s fault, and Steve told him, in English and in sign, that he’d take full responsibility.

Now, there was a wall to climb, sir, and a puppy in need on the other side of it. So if you’ll excuse us.

The puppy was white with spots on her toes and dopey-looking.

Steve loved her.

He was allergic to her, but no matter. He loved her. He would overcome. And Sam would eventually realize that it wasn’t his job to chase Steve around and keep him away from the dangers of the world.

It was Bucky’s.

And Bucky was doing a bang-up job of it, thanks.

He told Sam that it was simply _his_ job to learn how this Steve was the same as the one that he knew, despite all the bumps and bruises.

Nothing had changed.

Nothing.

This was home, he told Sam.

This version of Steve was home.

Steve met with Foggy Nelson and this time, Foggy Nelson had to look down at him, but he still smiled wide and said, “Welcome back, Cap.”

Steve cracked a grin at him and wanted to meet the devil. The devil was in his office, Foggy Nelson said, but was _very shy_.

Steve asked why.

Foggy Nelson explained that Steve was his first and only superhero as a kid and he was _freaking out_ at the prospect of meeting him awake.

That was an interesting turnaround.

“Oh, well. I just wanted to say thank you,” Steve said. “For not giving up on me. And I wanted to thank you for the same thing.”

Nelson looked a little teary.

“Of course, Cap,” he said. “Here, let me go get him before climbs out the window.”

Matt Murdock, the devil, had to be fetched from the roof and then hid his whole body behind Foggy Nelson when he was coaxed back into the office.

He refused, point blank, to speak to Steve beyond pleasantries.

Nelson told him to stop embarrassing them in front of their client and this inspired him to bolt for his office and slam the door and climb out his window for a second time.

Bucky suddenly understood why Nelson just got it.

His best friend was one of them.

You know, one of _them_.

Sam said that that guy deserved a raise as they watched Nelson re-climb back out onto the roof and shout for his partner who had apparently decided that vertical gain was a better game-plan this time.

“YOU FUCKHEAD,” Nelson snarled directly above the window. “Get down here, you massive—”

Matt Murdock, the devil, said that there was no need to be so rude.

Nelson reached up and snatched his shoe and came back into the office proper holding it.

He offered it to Steve as a symbol of their office’s support.

Murdock threw the other one inside the window and said “Joke’s on you, pretty boy, I don’t _need ‘em_.”

And Nelson turned purple with aggravation.

Steve was more charmed than ever by the two of them and laughed. He thanked Foggy and asked if two people could execute a will and they got back on track.

Eventually, the devil came crawling back in, when he thought they were all preoccupied, and Bucky watched him feel around for his shoe in the main room. Once the first was located, he set to work finding the other one, but it was sitting on Nelson’s desk, on a stack of reference books.

The devil made a sound of frustration and stood up abruptly to slam his head into a bookshelf out in the waiting area.

He wasn’t so scary like this.

Bucky wondered if he’d ever thought about branching out of Hell’s Kitchen. He didn’t ask though. He knew what it was like to be homesick.

Steve fit comfortably between him and Sam in the bed and, if anything, he abused his privilege. He burrowed into Sam’s chest and stole all his heat, leaving Bucky to the birds.

Bucky kept coming downstairs to find him climbing on shit, cursing the house and its construction for ‘them bastard giants.’ I.e. anyone over 5’ 9”.

Sam noticed a little wooden stool while they were out seeking laundry detergent and identified this as the solution to Steve’s problems.

Bucky decided to let him learn on his own.

Steve found a home for the stool in the garage, covered by boxes and rugs. When Sam liberated it from that home, he found a new place for it in the studio as a stand for paints and water jugs.

Sam liberated it from that home and set it firmly in the kitchen while Steve was rifling through the cabinets above the stove.

Steve didn’t hear him set it down, but he did hear Sam’s ‘Ahem.’ He looked over his shoulder and then at the stool. His face did not move. He returned to his rifling.

The stool mysteriously found its way back into the garage.

Steve was more comfortable at his original size, Bucky thought. And even though he appreciated the bevy of people working on an antidote for his current predicament, Bucky thought that he hadn’t been so relaxed in years.

He’d started lilting like he used to.

Sam thought he was watching too much British TV again and wrote it off as some kind of World War II joke, but Bucky knew better and it was _delightful_.

He lilted back at Steve and had his attention immediately.

It had been so long.

They’d just gotten used to speaking like other people these days.

Steve sat in his lap and combed his hair and spoke to him in Gaelige. Bucky didn’t know the language. He was a generation removed and his folks hadn’t been nationalists like Steve’s had. He knew a few words, here and there, but he liked to listen anyways.

The skimming consonants and cadence sounded right in Steve’s mouth. He sounded like his mother, which suited him.

Mother tongues and all that.

It was too familiar.

Too good to last.

And Steve’s bones, strong as steel as they were, started to get tired.

He was a century old. Immuno-compromised. Allergic even to the puppy he’d named Aoibhe.

This Steve—this home—wasn’t safe where they were now. So Bucky cradled him close and let himself be cradled—too large for Steve’s arms anymore, too harsh and angular. Too metallic and cold.

Steve pressed in close and said that if he could stay this way, that he would, but he wasn’t done yet. And this home—this body—it had never been made to last.

He’d forgotten what it was like. Where he’d started. How he’d built himself.

And he couldn’t live in the past, no matter how comfortable it was.

So three months down the line, Steve went back into the hospital and closed his eyes, holding Sam’s hand.

He kept the lilt.

He kept the frames.

He kept Aiobhe and riled her up by feinting at chasing her.

He slept between Sam and Bucky for the first few nights to remind them that he hadn’t gone anywhere. Then he hopped over back onto Sam’s other side and buried himself into Sam’s shoulders and refused to come out without a toll of a kiss being paid for his trouble.

And then he went out and found that stool and taught the damn dog how to jump up onto it and sit pretty for her portrait. And when that didn’t work out for him, he sneakily took it away and gave it to a neighbor.

He lilted at Bucky in the morning with a beautiful smile and he didn’t have the aches and his hands were still ruddy.

And Bucky could do nothing but kiss him and kiss him to remind himself that the new home wasn’t so bad after all.

These bones were still steel.

This heart was still beating.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this months ago and only now just reopened it and decided to share.


End file.
